UCL Laboratory for Language and Speech Diversions

Intoxicated Phonology

This research is intended to
address the question of whether alcohol could improve the linguistic
performance of second language learners in speech. There has been a widely held
myth that alcohol could enhance the fluency of second language learners whose
subjective experience, by and large, seems to be consonant with this myth.
However it has yet to be tested that whether this "enhancement" is
linguistic or not. As alcohol is known to impair motor control, one would
normally expect an increase in speech errors made by the alcohol-influenced
participants. To elucidate this, a series of experiments are being conducted by
giving appropriate participants small and controlled doses of alcohol and their
performance (in terms of speech rate, accuracy and more) will be measured.

We are currently concluding experiments on Korean, Greek, and German learners of English.